After spending the past few months throwing tens of billions of dollars away bailing out individual financial institutions, our government is now reportedly spending the weekend putting the finishing touches on The Bailout To End All Bailouts. The plan appears to be quite simple; just add another trillion or so to the already massive federal deficit by assuming all the bad mortgage-related debts for pretty much the entire investment industry.

Every politician and talking head out there seems to be parroting the same line, that the alternative would be even worse, that our entire financial system could collapse. It seems to be taken as a given that we cannot allow this to happen. The prevailing mentality is that the rich must be allowed to remain rich.

Well, I have questions. Many questions.

Time after time we have seen what happens when our government hands one sector of the market the authority to regulate itself, providing it enough leeway to manipulate the system and start pushing the entire market around. It inevitably generates a boom that turns out to be built on air. Isn’t it obvious that this “system” our government is hell-bent on saving is broken? Isn’t it equally obvious that it’s broken in just such a way that every boom-bust cycle winds up benefitting the rich at the expense of the middle and lower class in homes, jobs and tax dollars?

Why are all these financial institutions and money market funds so heavily invested in home mortgages anyway? (Is that the same as asking why America doesn’t actually make anything but war any more?) We're a nation of heavy debtors in a recession with seemingly nothing to invest in except the paper backing our own debts.

I can’t shake the feeling that, under the guise of conservatism, corporate America has attached itself to our nation's revenue and is siphoning off as much as they can, as fast as they can. Is it truly irrelevant, as our political leaders seem to believe, whether our government is economically sound as long as corporate America turns a profit?

I find it interesting that our system of unrestrained capitalism ultimately has the same result as that of communism. Commerce ends up in the hands of government, and vice versa; the line between government revenue and corporate profit no longer exists. When government becomes nothing more than a life support system and safety net for unrestrained capitalism, can it really still be called a democracy?

And lastly, if one were to set out to deliberately destroy a country economically, could one possibly do it any less efficiently than our current government’s system of cutting government revenue through massive tax cuts followed up with insane deficit spending on meaningless, open-ended wars and propping up of collapsed financial markets on credit?